I'm trying to launch a one man startup on a relatively small budget while simultaneously grappling with an extreme lack of knowledge and time. Here's the situation: I'm a noob/intermediate level web dev who has been using Ruby-on-Rails, html, and css to make mostly static sites with very low traffic and backend requirements. I am not a programmer by trade and I've never developed anything that had to scale beyond a user or two. I come to programming fitfully and angrily in an attempt to make my ideas come to fruition. Imagine a guy who made his first go-kart making the leap to engineering a Formula 1 car...you get the point.

So I have this idea that I believe will change the world (and honestly if you don't believe what you're doing will change the world...why are you doing it?) and I need to find out as quickly as possible if it will stick and be wildly successful or whether it will fail miserably and send me into a pit of despair. The kind of despair where you roll around in your own filth for weeks, wearing nothing but a bath robe and looking at Reddit all day.

I know what my needs are, I know how I'm going to go about implementing it, and I know that it would take me many months to progress through the learning curve to get to a point where I could make version 1.0 a reality. Even then, my lack of coding background means that even simple errors take hours of StackOverflow and Google searching to diagnose. I frequently find that I "don't know what I don't know", leading me to make horrible design decisions that only show themselves much later.

With these constraints in mind, I resolved myself to look for help on Elance, oDesk, Rent-a-coder, etc. At first I restricted my searches to people in North America but was unable to find someone with the mix of skills I need. However I was propositioned by a company in India that has not only the exact skill mix I need, but has built similar systems and has great ratings too. Naturally I'm cautious sending thousands of dollars overseas, language barriers, communication/time difference issues, etc.

So.....what do you think? Anyone have any good or bad experiences outsourcing coding? Thoughts, concerns, etc?

tl;dr: I am trying to launch a startup with n00b coder skills. Need help coding high-level stuff. Can't find a good coder locally, found a good one with specific skills needed in India. Should I do it?